How effective is energy healing?

A lot of people swear by it, some deride it. Let’s take a look at a new case study.

Riverdance star Michael Flatley recently spoke in the press about how energy healing has saved his career.

In 2006 the dancer was struck by a strange virus that doctors had been unable to pin down, which left him exhausted and suffering from acute joint and muscular pain. He approached Irish complementary therapy practitioner, Michael O’Doherty for help with his condition when conventional medicine failed him.

O’Doherty, who pioneered the Plexus Bio-Energy system that has reportedly worked wonders for Flatley, has praised Flatley’s positive character and commitment to his own healing, using words such as ‘charismatic’ and ‘inspiring’ to describe his client.

Plexus practitioners detect energy blockages within a client’s energy system and remove these with a selection of hand movements, allowing life energy to flow freely. O’Doherty’s website claims that the technique unlocks the healing ability lying dormant within every cell of the body.

The Plexus system also encourages clients to take ownership of their own life and health through self empowerment and an increased awareness of the need for a harmonious existence. O’Doherty believes that developing our psychic abilities is key if we are to move out of the current discordant consciousness of world crisis:

“Unfolding our extrasensory or psychic potential is the gateway for humanity to mature out of its present ecological and spiritual crisis into a species which is capable of living at peace with itself and in harmony with the Earth and Universe,” he says.

If you have ever been diagnosed as suffering from depression, or suspect you may have a depressive illness, take heart.

Professor Jerome Wakefield of New York University believes sadness and depression are essential tools of evolution that prompt “sufferers” to become high achievers in life. He cites Winston Churchill, Beethoven, Abraham Lincoln and Isaac Newton as depressives who made good.

Wakefield says: “When you find something this deeply in us biologically, you presume it was selected because it had some advantage, otherwise we wouldn’t have been burdened with it. We’re fooling around with part of our biological makeup.”

He further believes that medical diagnoses of depression and its treatment with powerful drugs, like Prozac, is an unnecessary and dangerous fad. His book, The Loss of Sadness: How psychiatry transformed normal sorrow into depressive disorder states that sadness helps us learn from our mistakes. “I think one of the functions of intense negative emotions is to stop our normal functioning — to make us focus on something else for a while.”

So, if you are feeling down and are tempted to pursue the chemical route to “salvation”, consider that a deep part of yourself may be attempting to convey something to you.

At least try to find out what it is before heading for the doc’s surgery.